"A life without cause is a life without effect."

Preparing for Parenthood…. and A LOT of traveling

We have been faithfully filling out and sending in different paperwork for the past eight months. Last week we went to the bank to get the first stack notarized and then sent it in to the department of state in Tallahasse to be apostilled. A state apostille (pronounced “a-po-steel”) serves the purpose of authenticating the signature of the notary public who has signed the document. In effect, the apostille is stating that the notary whose signature appears on the document is in fact registered and has a valid, current commission in that state. The documents will come back with a pretty gold seal, making it very official-looking. We are hoping to get the documents back this week. That would be really awesome.

From that point, we will send it to the agency, they will have it translated to Russian and send it to Russia. Then we wait for the referrals. (When they send us basic information and pictures of the children and we decide if we want to proceed witht he adoption and fly to Russia to meet them.)

This week my sister, Elina, her husband, Vlad and their two girls, Adalia, almost 2 years old and Ariella, 2 months old, were visiting us.

Vladimir, Adalia, Ariella and Elina

We had such a great time together. Sergi and I really enjoyed spending time with our beautiful nieces. It made us even more excited to finally become parents.

We have spent the last 6 years as a couple, just Sergi and I, and it will be quite an adjustment to having 2 toddlers in the house. After going shopping with Adalia or Ariella in a carseat in the back, it makes parenting become so much more real.

Addy helping Sergi figure out the carseat

We got a small glimpse into our new life and we LOVED it. It was so much fun watching Addy’s pleased expression as she would hand Sergi something to put in the cart. I’m definitely not used to having a little person running underfoot in my kitchen or opening all the cupboards and playing with the mixing bowls.I’m also not used to cuddling a two month old who looks at you so trustingly and smiles so sweetly and wholeheartedly.

What can be more beautiful than a smiling baby?

They have pulled at my hearstings in so many ways! The most important discovery we made was how much richer life is with children around. The world seems happier and brighter. We are very ready to embrace our new roles.

We have heard some great news from our agency and some other families who are adopting from Krasnoyarsk using our agency, who have told us that referrals are coming in very quickly, like within 10 days! We are so hopeful and happy. I just want to go start packing right now:).

We didn’t realize that we can send in the first part of the paperwork and then work on the second part, (which are all the documents that we will need for court), so we finished all of them! Or I should say, the biggest part of the paperwork. We still have a paper or two to finish, but it’s no big deal compared to everything else that we had to do. All of this means, that we shouldn’t have any holdups for court, on our end anyway.

Here’s one of the pictures for court that Elina took outside our apartment.

When you adopt, you have no privacy:). We have to send pictures of every room in our home, the front and back of the house for the Russian court. They even know how much money we have in the bank, what we own, how much we earn, if we have insurance, etc. Even our siblings names, occupations and where they live. It feels kind of funny to disclose everything – I guess it’s a good thing we don’t have anything to hide.

Please continue to pray for us so there wouldn’t be anymore delays with the paperwork, and we could finish it quickly.